The Marvellous Mega-vennels of Montrose

Our nearest town, which prefers to be called a city, is Perth. Perth is very proud of its vennels – the usually narrow and dark alleyways between streets, blocks and buildings that litter the mediaeval layout of the town (sorry, city) centre. They even had a long museum exhibition all about them, which revealed just how few there are left, compared to the maze shown on old maps.

I like getting from A to B in as straight a line as possible, while avoiding roads, and vennels are helpful in this. So wherever I go, I am on the lookout for hidden entrances and gaps, whether in forest or town. Montrose, on a breezy August afternoon when we jumped on a train at random, was no exception.

Arriving by train in Montrose is confusing, because the first thing that hits your eyes when alighting is the sea. Except it’s not – it’s Montrose Basin, a vast, round expanse of inland water where the River South Esk spreads in all directions with the tide, filled with wildfowl and waders and enough Pink-footed geese in autumn to warrant a day when all the townsfolk are encouraged to wear pink footwear to celebrate their return. After gazing longingly across the mudflats of the basin at low tide, we turned 180 degrees and attempted to reorient ourselves to head into the town, which is sandwiched between Basin and the North Sea. When we arrived at the High Street, it took a while to work out whether we were at the north or south end of it. I’m not sure I ever did.

Montrose centre is made up of three roughly parallel roads, , all lovingly linked by “vennels” and the occasional Wynd, Lane or Road. And what vennels they are! Some are narrow and dark and very long, set between tall buildings. With the only light a gleam at the other end, you could imagine you were in Maes Howe in Orkney, creeping towards a burial chamber. Some are rough red sandstone, open to the skies but still hemmed between homes and shops, until they turn abruptly to a wider space, and plants and wildlife decorate the walls – and you reach a boring car park at the end.

Most of the ones linking to the High Street are handsomely maintained, with painted walls for the first 5 or 10 metres, timber cladding, and even decorated with ornate metalwork and paintings! They have names, but the term “vennel” isn’t used here. The ones named “close”– Swapps Close, Queens Close – probably led originally to private courtyards and were “closed” at one end, while the through-routes – like New Wynd – have sometimes been developed into winding streets.

The names sometimes refer to events in history but often there is no name. We came upon the occasional story – such as the commemoration (on one of the scruffier vennels) of Scottish renaissance write Hugh McDiarmid, who worked as a journalist in Montrose in the 1920s.

Unlike Perth’s vennels, none seem to be related to the crafts and trades that inhabited them in the past, but surely they were widely used in one former occupation of the town. Montrose was rife with smugglers. Trusting in the ubiquity of vennels/closes, we explored many and wound up in the brilliant Montrose Museum, to find out more of the town’s history: why there’s a Castle Street but no Castle (destroyed by William Wallace); how the Old Pretender James Edward Stuart, was hidden in various closes before being shipped out of the harbour to permanent exile, and the machinations of the handsome Grahams, the Marquesses of Montrose.

Then we meandered north (or was it south?) until another vennel or wynd presented itself for a short cut back to the High Street and brunch in the cool, dark, and secret Coffee House, whose meandering stone walls, odd corners and breakfast rolls perhaps made it the best vennel of all!

CONNECTIONS (2)

On the first day of autumn
when outside my window the day was hazy, semi-opaque,
my mother would get me up early, protesting, drowsy,
made me dress
long before school-time. Outside in the garden, she led me,
where dew had fallen heavy, not quite frozen, and the sun
too bleary-eyed to shine save with a watery smile.

And all the spiders in all the corners had made new webs in the night
countless spiders, unreckonable numbers of types of web,
great and small, clarity and chaos,
and not a one could frighten me.

She walked me round the garden slowly, holding my hand,
we took turns to point and gasp, for
in every joining point of every web
a drop of water, wobbling,
flung colour and shimmer and magic as we moved,
or as they shook in a tiny breeze.

Not one jewel could tremble, or fall, without the rest all twinkling, or falling too.
Each reflected in the other,
every rainbow in every dewdrop sparkled in those around it.

If the sun broke through, or if it ceased to shine,
the lights went out, one by one.
Extinction caught by those nearby, passed on
until there were no jewels to find, and all were lessened or dispirited.

In India, in ancient times, they dreamed that web as one encompassing universes;
at every node, a jewel for every being, for every kind of being –
– massive and minute, still or moving, known and unknown, gods and hungry ghosts –
and when the dew fell that created them
each one shone, enriched by the light of the next;
dazzling the skies and the waters and every heart.

And when the web is damaged, when one jewel grows dull and shines no more,
one entering darkness puts out the light of another.

But in Indra’s net, jewels may have agency.
Choices, whether to shine and illuminate. Or not.
Whether to gladly reflect the light of others and
fill the world with rainbows. Or not.

You must do both for it to work.

(image: UNIGUIDE)

CONNECTIONS (1)

It seems ironic that this summer, punctuated as it is by heatwaves, record-breaking temperatures and wildfires from Suffolk to Sutherland (and that’s just in Britain) I should be so richly entertained by insects. Not ironic that they like the hot, dry weather – of course they do, so long as they have food and water. It’s as though, at the same time that we are forced to stare climate catastrophe in the face, we are also reminded of what we stand to lose. Nature is shouting at us!

Our local rewilding site (Rewilding Denmarkfield) recorded their highest annual count of butterflies in July, with 3 months still to go, and a wide diversity of bee, butterfly and moth species. In Taymount Wood, a wonderful wild flower walk organised by West Stormont Woodland Group and Perthshire Society of Natural Science culminated in an experience that could only be described as magical – walking through a woodland glade full of knapweed and thistles in flower, where the butterflies and moths were way too many to count, too glorious and moving around us in clouds, to identify. Many were quite common – Peacock, Red Admiral, Meadow Brown – and some less often spotted – Small Copper, Dark Green Fritillary. But identification becomes irrelevant when a Peacock Butterfly is sitting on your arm for ages and you realise just how astonishingly beautiful are those iridescent “eyes”, the sheen of gold and blue and glistening terracotta, the soft hairs around a plump abdomen, the unreal curliness of the nectar-seeking proboscis. In my own garden, where a holiday, a heatwave and a strimmer breakdown caused a dusty meadow of flowering grasses to replace what we used to pretend was a no-cut May & June “lawn”, Meadow Brown butterflies have moved in, and a cloud of micromoths whenever you try to walk through it.

Factors I’d like to think have helped: the careful meadow management regime at Denmarkfield; partly deliberate, partly accidental non-interventions by gardeners like me; WSWG managing to persuade Forest & Land Scotland NOT to cut the path edges just as the knapweed was starting to flower as they’ve done before….

Last week, I did my monthly Bee-walk, for the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. One of my Walks starts conveniently at my front door and this time, I found it hard to get out of the garden! Apart from spotting male Field Cuckoo bumblebees for the first time on the elecampane, there were so many bees on wild oregano and fascinating insects I wasn’t meant to be recording to engage with – as well as an unexpectedly large wasp byke in my comfrey-tea bin to escape from! I nibbled the first blackberries on my way; there has been such a huge crop of Tayberries, currants and gooseberries I haven’t begrudged the blackbirds a share of any of them. And the apple, pear and damson harvest will be spectacular soon. I continued my Bee-walk, noting, as usual, less insects in general around highly-managed arable landscapes. But the rosebay willow herb in full flow along the verges literally buzzed. It had attracted more Field Cuckoo bees, and all a neighbour’s honeybees. Last month, wild raspberry flowers were the main attraction on this section. Now, most of the raspberries themselves had been eaten, by birds, beasts or humans – although those left, slightly fermenting, were being enjoyed by various shiny flies.

Photo by Kris Mu00f8klebust on Pexels.com

It was a beautiful afternoon, so, bee walk finished, I kept on walking, along the narrow path where I foraged delectable, dripping-sweet gean cherries from the overhanging branches of self-sown wild cherry trees. Gean cherries can occasionally be disappointing – and they are always a quarter of the size of “shop” cherries – but these trees are special. Some produce rich, power packed black fruit, and some crisp, pale red and white ones – all are good. I ate all the ones I could reach by jumping and grabbing a branch, but my high-jumping skills have always been limited. On I went, past stands of feral and wild gooseberries in the hedgerow shade, to hunt speculatively for mushrooms in the wood and sit on my favourite log watching trees grow and fall, and seed swell. There I bumped into Sammy, a neighbouring dog, and his owner, Chris, who luckily is about ten feet tall. We walked back together, exchanging nature notes and helping ourselves to the high-up cherries, spitting out the stones into the hedgerow as we went along.

I thought about connections. Such a buzz-word these days! Do you have a connection? Are you well connected? What kind of connection do they have there? Have you lost your connection? These were the connections I listed:

Between the insects and the flowers, causing fruit and seed
Between the fruit in my garden and the birds who get half of them
Between me and my neighbours, who share the fruit in our gardens, and the jams and jellies we make
Between the animals – squirrels, birds, deer, mice, me and Chris – who eat the fruit and disperse the seed to grow more trees and bushes
Between the trees, bushes and flowers who evolved to survive through pollination by insects and seed dispersal by animals

These are just some of the vital connections we need to enshrine in our consciousness. And, perhaps to a lesser degree, but in a way that has become necessary, even the high-speed broadband and fibre connections that inform, that make citizen science relevant, that create dialogues, promote regenerative ways of thinking, change the mindset of turgid quangos and (maybe) some stuck politicians – and which bring these ramblings to your inbox.

Nature IS shouting – let’s keep listening.

JOINING A REVOLUTION

Photo by Rafael Minguet Delgado on Pexels.com

The taxi from the overnight ferry from Bari dropped us in the centre of Tirana, by Skanderbeg Square. Crossing the square, diving from one patch of shade to another, we blinked at the wild cacophony of buildings and a skyscape of tall cranes and construction sites. Traffic seemed to hurtle alarmingly – it was a while before I realised that almost everyone kept to the speed limit, that the second a pedestrian stepped onto a crossing the traffic would stop and wait patiently, that Albanian drivers have a supernatural awareness of every road user and that all the tooting of horns was more about maintaining awareness than road rage.

Those weird new skyscrapers! Not just tall, but with odd bits sticking out here and there, unbalanced looking appendages and twists and crazy changes in level -all sitting side by side with communist-era facades and dishevelled blocks of apartments – and if you delved behind an alley, you might find characteristic traditional Albanian houses, forgotten in the enthusiasms of redevelopment. I learned that the new tall buildings are mostly designed by highly paid foreign architects. Ego plays large. I took a photo of one skyscraper being built overlooking the square. When I reviewed the photo, it was clear that all the indentations create an enormous face – supposedly that of the Albanian hero Skanderbeg the Great. But my daughter-in-law Milena put me right: “Everyone thinks it look too much like Edi Rama,” she said. “He has a big ego.” Edi Rama is the prime minister. More of him later.

Slowly, via museums and air-conditioned cafes, we made our way to our Air BnB in Blloku. Tirana centre is small enough to cross comfortably on foot. Walking along the Lana river, we heard a lot of shouting, and turned off up a road closed by police vehicles to investigate. We found a large gathering outside the police headquarters. The Albanian flag, the two headed eagle on a red background waved wildly, banners demanded the release of someone…. With the help of the internet, I learned that 6 protesters had been detained on the previous evening’s mass demonstration and were still in custody. (They were later released without charge).

This was our first meeting with the Flamingo Revolution on day 31 of protests. We were hoping to support it while in Tirana. If you haven’t heard of it, now is the time to listen. It began when Edi Rama, he of the ego, decided it was a good idea to allow an American billionaire, Jared Kushner, and his wife, Ivanka Trump (yes, that one) to buy a swathe of protected coastal land and lagoon at Zvernic in southern Albania, and develop it as an exclusive resort. Word got out that Ivanka was boasting that she’d soon own her very own private Albanian island. Environmentalists got angry about the threat to the rich wetland ecosystems, where flamingos and much more breed, and suddenly, Albanians had had enough. Planning permission has not yet been granted, yet fences and private security firms have appeared already. Local people were physically harassed (although somebody managed to push the developers’ offices down a cliff in return).

Nightly protests began in central Tirana, attracting thousands of people, including many ex-pat Albanians who came home specifically to protest. Accusations of corruption in government, and especially at Edi Rama, were hurled. According to Al-Jazeera, the land deeds apparently sold to Kushner and Trump have been proven to be forged. Rama denies it. No-one believes him and the Flamingo Revolution widens to demand his resignation – and more. This is how they describe it on their website:

“Flamingo Revolution is a civic movement dedicated to protecting nature, defending citizens’ rights, and building a fair, transparent and liveable Albania for Everyone.”
(flamingorevolution.org)

It isn’t just about the Vjose-Narta delta, or birds, you see. It’s about corruption in government, the frantic rush to “develop” the country following decades of communist dictatorship, for the benefit of a few and to the detriment of many. The “Albanian Riviera” has become a thing – of course – beaches, endless sunshine, blue skies and an enticingly clear Mediterranean sea perhaps make that inevitable. Resorts are concreted into ripped-away and bulldozed hillsides, promoted (tellingly, in English) with words like “elite”, “private”, “luxury”, “exclusive”….. Each resort or hotel grabs its section of beach and plasters it with sun-loungers and parasols, while the “public” beach gets smaller and smaller. Those skyscrapers – who benefits?

The next night we all went to join the Flamingo Revolution outside the government offices. SHQIPERIA NUK ESHTE NE SHITJE! (ALBANIA IS NOT FOR SALE!), we cried, and DORE HEQJEN! DORE HEQJEN! (RESIGN!). Our granddaughters were still shouting it the next night. It was peaceful, determined and passionate. The people aren’t going away. So far, sadly, neither is Rama.

Two days after that, we met the flamingos, themselves, close up, at Divjake National Park where we walked with a brilliant and dedicated guide, (https://guidedivjake.com) across sandy, flat, reclaimed land to the fringes of a massive lagoon. Divjake is the start of this incredible biodiverse stretch of coast. Butterflies, cicadas, solitary bees, grasshoppers and other insects vied with storks, white herons, pelicans, bee-eaters, waders and an off-piste osprey for our attention. This was tourism at its most sustainable – and most enjoyable. Later that evening, we climbed the hill of the ancient city of Apollonia and looked south to Zvernec, and beyond it to pristine Sazan Island that Trump junior has her greedy eyes on.

I’ve seen what’s been lost, what is being lost – and what could be lost. For what? Short term profits for a few – and with Spain on fire and Spanish resorts built for tourists emptying, you’ve got to wonder if anyone in the government is thinking long term. I hope the hospitable, welcoming, generous and courageous people of Albania uphold this revolution and are not lost as well.

It’s significant for all of us, everywhere.

Migrants

They will be here soon
flying through the night
piercing the muffled silence
as stars punctuate darkness’s depths.
They are coming,
converging,
greeting each other,
flying alongside and ahead.

Battalions with no borders to defend
no wars to fight
no points to score.

To the stirring fields of autumn
to the flat black water
to the margins,
they approach.

Let’s meet them there.

I was on a bus between Perth and Edinburgh last week. As it swung into Kinross to pick up passengers, I glanced up at the amazing Kinross Gateway sculpture of three pink-footed geese alighting (David F. Wilson, https://dfwilson.co.uk/1371-2/). I thought, ah yes, the pink-foots. They’ll be on their way now. In my mind I could see them sweeping the skies, could hear their incessant babbling on the wind. The poem above got written before the bus had even got to Kelty. By the time I go to the end of it, I wasn’t only writing about geese. The last line references a famous poem by the 12th century Persian Sufi poet, Rumi, which goes like this:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.”

Mr. Standfast

The little wood has become tangled, and the paths vague and meandering in the past few years, since Jed our collie died. Few people walk them, and even when it was a regular walk for me and Jed, they tended to shift and change, as blackthorn grew to block one route, or trees, felled by the wind or growing with vigour, made another way more attractive.

But always, there have been certain way-markers:- the overgrown guerrilla-planted Christmas tree, the gap in the field boundary where the wire’s trampled down, a patch of brambles, the fallen birch that still produces shoots…. Today, alone, I beat the path out again, lost in thickets of gorse and thorn, disoriented by the sound of traffic, unsure of distances among an understory of fern and broom. As so many times before, when coming from diverse directions, my brain unconsciously looks for you to reset my compass. I know I must pass you on my left to regain the path downhill and out of the wood.

You are the biggest, broadest, in the wood, though perhaps not the tallest or the oldest, and certainly not as old as me. With two feet firmly planted, you stand fast and firm among the rest who bend and break in the wind, and you spread your many solid arms in all directions, and to the sky.

Here you are. Now I know my way way. But wait – have we ever truly met? Have I ever really seen you, Mr. Standfast? Today I approach with awareness, pausing in stages, taking you in. A rush of warmth, of joy… joy or recognition, joy at being recognised. When I reach close enough to touch, my gardener’s – my orchardist’s – eye notes dead, stiff and black lower branches and itches, for a second, for loppers. But then I watch the beetle’s progress through the moss and lichen upon them; the moist droplets of old rain sustaining the beings on the branch, and recognise, it’s none of my damned business.

We are together for a good while, without words, unified by our alikeness, as your very own warbler comes to join us, bursting into that fitful exhuberance of song that wears itself out in a twittering, grumpy-sounding mutter, then kicks off a few minutes later to try again. I feel the healing nature of your skin, the questing stability and strength of your roots, the air you breathe, I breathe, we breathe. For a moment, I know we are one, with the lichens and beetles and warblers and the things unseen.

I know my way now. As I rejoin the ghost of a path, my palms carry the imprint of willow bark, like a memory, like a gift.

Train Going Nowhere

I haven’t written this blog for ages, and what follows is a comment neither on nature nor the universe. It’s an account of a vivid dream from which I’ve just awoken, and it might be a comment on the human part of this small dot in the universe today. Or it might not. See what you think.

Somewhere in the industrial north of England, I was running to catch an underground train. I couldn’t quite keep up with my partner and when I arrived on the platform, he was just pressing a button to get on a single huge, black, open carriage – which was all the train consisted of. The doors slid open, he got on, I went to follow and the doors closed in front of me. So I waited a while and got on the next, identical, “train”. It resembled an old-fashioned coach without a horse – with a roof, but no glass in the windows. There were quite a few passengers sprawled around inside, on seats, the floor, or couches.

I didn’t know where we were, and wasn’t sure what my partner would do – go on to our destination and wait for me there, or get off at the next station and come back to find me? I also couldn’t remember, or had never bothered to find out, our destination. No matter, I thought, I’ll look at Google maps….. Only, I seemed to have lost my phone. We had bought a cheap sort of “toy” version for emergencies, which we hadn’t got out of its box yet. Of course, there were no Google apps, or else I couldn’t find them. In fact, I couldn’t find anything useful. Well, never mind, I could just ring him and he could tell me where we were, why we were there and where we were going.

But I couldn’t fathom how to make a simple phone call on the device. There seemed to be lots of games, but no means of communication. Station after station went by as I struggled with it, and endless vistas of industrial wasteland and dark satanic mills – and networks of grimy canals – were the only clues I could see as to where we were. One passenger, a middle-aged man, offered some help and advice, but none of his tips and instructions seemed to make any sense, or they didn’t work, and soon he fell asleep. The train hit the barrier which marked the end of the line, but without a pause reversed and set off back on the same track. This happened repeatedly; it got dark – and I had another problem.

For some reason, I was carrying the smaller of my ginger cats, Jeoffry, in my arms. A very biddable and lazy animal, Jeoffry was finally showing signs of annoyance and wanting to get off the train. Fearful he would jump out of the open window, and desperate not to lose him as well, I clung on to cat with one arm while trying to get some sense out of the phone with the other hand. It dawned on me that all I had to do was read the instructions, which, after a struggle I prised out of the base of the box. This thick wad of paper, as I supposed, must have the answer to how to use a phone to phone someone.

But as I opened each layer, out jumped some cheap plastic toy or game or cartoon show, which expanded with the air to make a growing heap of unwanted junk on my lap (with the cat), and nowhere in all these gimmicks could I find any decipherable instructions. I noted that a disproportionate number of my fellow passengers were children, all busy playing with games and toys already. I tried to offload a set of plastic animals the phone had disgorged onto one of them. He wasn’t interested – he had loads of plastic toys already, surrounding him on the floor. If they weren’t so distracted, mightn’t one of these (presumably) tech-savvy infants be able to get my “phone” to work?

Getting desperate, I appealed loudly for help. The man who’d first advised me woke up. “Are you still looking for people to help you?” he sneered. “What is it it now?”

“For a start,” I replied, “where are we? What is this place?”

He tutted. “Great Yorrington”, he said, and proceeded to lecture me on then history of the murky waste we were passing through. By the time he finished we were somewhere else entirely, but equally murky.

So there I was. Left behind, not understanding where I was and ignorant of where I was going, unable to communicate with anyone who could tell me. Confounded by crappy technology which delivered only junk and gimmicks and no truthful information, while surrounded by people so completely engrossed in their own junk and toys they were totally unaware of anyone else’s difficulties, and had no apparent interest in where they were going. And all the time, desperately trying to hold on to the living, breathing, warm thing that was all I had of value on that train.

I’m glad to say I woke up.

One other thing. Of course, the train was driverless, and completely unsupervised.

Digging? A View from 1946

Detectorists in Bankfoot

In the weak, blinking sunshine, wind-chilled and watery,
The top fields swarm with detectorists from West Lothian,
Thinly spread, rigorously spaced, slowly they move,
like cautious extra-terrestrials,
each has a rigid, but fluidly-swaying trunk, held just above the ground,
all wear rucksacks or cloth bags that sport spade-shaped antennae.

Every so often,
a detectorist drops to his knees and starts to dig,
carefully refilling each hole before moving on.
I greet a smiling pair of them at the gate.
“I only get Sunday off, but I wouldn’t be anywhere else,” says one.
Do they find treasure? Laughter rings –
“be better off buying a lottery ticket for that!” But….
each has a tale to tell, of tobacco tins and Victorian pennies;
last weekend, a Bronze Age spearhead –
“in this very field!” And anyway, “it’s this I enjoy best,”
– throwing an arm towards the hills, the grazing geese,
the spruced-up-for-spring yellowhammers in the hedge –
“being outside. The scenery. And the people are all lovely.”

They are. I admire their hi-tech gear, wish them luck….
And off they go again. Watching their measured tread, I know
(whether they do or not) detecting’s a walking meditation,
just as anglers sit and meditate on water, fish or no fish.

(If you’d like to know more, visit https://metaldetectingscotland.co.uk/ Guess who’s tempted…)

Reeds, Rushes and the Spaces between Trees

On a quiet day of winter sun and muted activity from woodland birds, I arrive at King’s Myre again. Reed Mace flowerheads from last year cluster around the watery margin, clogging the channel by the little jetty where the boats wait and fill with rain. We used to call them “bulrushes” where I grew up, and it wasn’t till Mr. Illesley, in Rural Studies, enlightened us all about the differences between reeds, rushes, sedges and grasses that I ever learned their proper name– or that Reed Mace is related, but none of these anyway!

It is the same plant known as cattails in America, and valued throughout its distribution for its edibility. The rhizomes – root like underground stems, or underwater ones in the case of this plant – are starchy and filling when baked. They can also be dried and ground into flour, though I never have. The pollen from the male flowers can be used as flour too, or to thicken sauces and soups. It has many medicinal uses. But the best part is the emerging shoot – which will be appearing above water level any time now. Cut, cleaned, steamed, baked, sauteed – it is a lovely spring vegetable to rivals asparagus or bamboo shoots for flavour and versatility. You can keep eating the shoots until the flower spikes start to emerge, you don’t need waders to forage it, and, as Reed Mace is actually quite an invasive plant, it’s pretty sustainable to nibble bits off the clump! Last year’s flowers are starting to burst apart now, revealing the dense, cottony-fluffy seedheads inside.

I creep through the spongy, saturated margins of the little loch at the heart of the King’s Myre, to peer through the cattails to see what wintering birds are on it today. Goldeneye, a few gadwall, mallards, a coot, typically swimming against the tide of the rest, intent on his own adventure. No sign of the swans, too early for the osprey to be home yet. In the damp woodland, waterlogged alcoves and scrapes, from which spiky, angular trees grow erratically, wait for frogs and toads to arrive for spawning. Between bare branches, multiple trunks and stems and a storm of tiny twigs, the blue sky seeps as if caught in a vast, arboreal net, reflected in patches of water.

Bracket fungi show off their smug Cornish-pasty smiles of concentric bands, on wood they share with moss and lichen, and a thousand invertebrates. Spread across the leaf-carpeted floor, long-dead logs, un-barked, silvery, yielding, are home to thousands and thousands more, riddled with holes and channels and hidden tunnels in the fungus-softened wood. On cue, somewhere in a dead tree, a woodpecker begins his first tentative drumming and drilling.

I look up into the Scots Pines, their narrow crowns dancing around each other like polite or nervous teenagers, and see the shapes of jagged sashes of sky, so clear, so blue….

Look up, look through, look between – there is much to see. Or is there only sky?